Last week, Intel announced it would spend $7 billion to upgrade an Arizona facility and employ 3,000 people to fabricate advanced computer wafers — meaning its CEO Brian Krzanich chose the United States over Ireland, Israel and China where Intel already produces silicon wafers.

So it makes sense that Fettig and Krzanich serve on President Donald Trump’s new Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. The initiative is supposed to help the president promote U.S. job and manufacturing growth.

Curiously, though, named to that same 28-member committee are at least seven CEOs who have recently — and sometimes infamously — offshored manufacturing and jobs. They include Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, the corporation that is shipping Indiana jobs from its Carrier subsidiary to Mexico.

The performance of the manufacturing council is crucial to large swaths of workers who voted for Trump based on his promises to stop unfair trade and resurrect American manufacturing. In his inauguration speech, the president told those voters that he would enact “America first” policies. It is no “America first” policy to send jobs from two profitable Carrier plants in Indiana to Mexico for the sole purpose of making extra bucks. That kind of offshoring exhibits a “Greed First” mindset. The CEOs who have pursued that philosophy should shut up and take advice from the committee’s American job creators.

The U.S. job generators on the committee include the likes of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. His cars were rated the most American-made electrics for content and assembly for the second year in a row in 2016.

A river barge transporting grain and scrap materials to be processed.

Caption: Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch wanted to be able to put factories on barges and ship them, on a corporate whim, to countries where it was cheaper to operate.

The United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. Robots didn’t do it. Trade deficits did. Corporations like Carrier and Rexnord that offshore American factories then ship the manufactured products back to the United States kill good American jobs while ballooning the trade deficit.

Those are the problems that workers who voted for Donald Trump wanted him to solve. They want those factories and those jobs back.

That, however, is the opposite of the longstanding philosophy of General Electric. Its former CEO Jack Welch famously said, “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge to move with currencies and changes in the economy.” In other words, when a country like China manipulates the value of its currency and suppresses its workers’ wages, GE would uproot production from Peoria and float it to Beijing – allegiance to the United States be damned.

That’s exactly what General Electric does under its current CEO Jeff Immelt. The show 60 Minutes described GE this way in 2009: “No company has gone global more aggressively than General Electric, the conglomerate that makes everything from refrigerators to MRI machines to jet engines.”

Immelt was GE chairman that entire time. So it’s confounding that he is a member of an initiative that’s supposed to prioritize American jobs.

Under Immelt’s leadership, not only does GE move factories, it uses offshoring as a threat when lawmakers don’t cave to its demands.

In September of 2015, two months after Congress declined to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, Immelt announced that GE, which had been among the largest benefactors of the bank, would move 500 U.S. jobs overseas.

Frankly, it’s unpatriotic CEOs like Immelt and Hayes who should be stuck on a barge and shipped offshore. An American Manufacturing Jobs Initiative needs more CEOs who actually focus on making it in America.

Recent Stories by Leo Gerard

America loves a party. So why not hold Saturday celebrations for mandated electors at American polling places? This is what happens in Australia, where turnout tops 91 percent and partygoers raise money for local schools and charities on their way to the polls.

Trump’s tariff war hasn’t solved the trade deficit problem. The August trade deficit with China was the highest on record, at $38.6 billion, and the deficit for 2018 is projected to be the largest ever. The trade deficit – that is, the billions more that China sells in the United States than the United States sells in China – is what kills jobs. As that deficit rises, more work to produce goods and services is done in China. If the deficit declined, or trade balanced, more work would be done in the United States. That is the administration’s goal. If it could be accomplished, workers’ job anxiety would ease.

Democracy is tough for one-percenters. They’ve got all that money but no more voting power than you or me. But they’ve got a plan to make America a one-dollar, one-vote plutocracy, by stripping voting rights from non-rich minority groups.

About Leo Gerard

Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers (USW), took office in 2001 after the retirement of former president George Becker.